In May of this year, Edward Albee’s 1962 classic “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” became controversial all over again, when the late playwright’s estate withheld the rights for a planned production in Portland, Ore. The reason? The director cast an African-American actor as Nick, the young, up-and-coming biology professor who, along with his wife, Honey, becomes entangled in the drunken late-night “games” of George and Martha.

The estate presumably has no problems with Pulse Theatre Chicago’s current (and cogent) staging of “Virginia Woolf,” directed by Chris Jackson, which features African-American actors as George and Martha. (There have been past productions featuring nonwhite actors, including one at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2002 in which Martha was played by African-American actor Andrea Frye.)

The director for the aborted Portland production said in a Facebook post that casting Nick as black “was a color-conscious choice, not a colorblind choice” and went on to posit the abuse that Nick endures with George and Martha in order to get ahead as “emblematic of African-Americans in 1962.”

Nothing quite that specific seems to be driving Jackson’s production, other than Pulse’s professed dedication to “inclusionary theater” and breaking down what a news release calls “barriers of repetitive casting archetypes.” And yet the choice gives us plenty to think about as the long night’s journey into day unfolds in George and Martha’s living room, especially given Lewis R. Jones’ and Nicholia Q. Aguirre’s protean and sometimes-hypnotic performances as the toxic hosts.

Most obviously, George’s grilling of Adam Zaininger’s Nick on the subject of eugenics takes on keener resonances. “You’re the one’s going to make all that trouble. Making everyone the same, rearranging the chromozones or whatever it is,” he accuses his guest, followed with, “I’m very mistrustful.” And indeed, why wouldn’t he be, given the racism of eugenicists and the historical abuse of African-Americans in research such as the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study?

If George is a “flop,” as Martha maintains, how much worse might that be for a black man in the early 1960s at what is presumably a mostly white college, where he’s carrying the weight of expectations not just for himself but for other black men who never got his educational opportunities? (The fact that his father-in-law is the college president, of course, would present a problem for a George of any racial or ethnic background.)

And if the “feminine mystique” suffocates educated white women of the time, what is left to Martha except anger and retribution toward the man on whom she pinned her hopes for fulfillment-by-proxy? (I’ve always thought Albee’s Martha has a bit in common with the writer Shirley Jackson, forced to play the faculty wife in Bennington, Vt. – a town she found so judgmental and narrow that it helped inspire “The Lottery.”)

These are thoughts that ebb and flow throughout the long course of the evening, where the mere presence of these skillful actors asks us to consider these characters and their demons from fresh angles. In many ways, Jackson takes a straightforward approach, though Jones’ George often seems more puckish and less passive than past interpretations I’ve seen. (Witness his teasing dance as he reminds Martha early on that he will always be six years younger than she is.) His sorrow is no less palpable for being cloaked in wry, withering observations, and it provides an intriguing counterbalance to Aguirre’s fearsome “Earth Mother” force of destructive nature.

Jones and Aguirre are well matched by Zaininger’s preening – and eventually defeated – Nick and by Kate Robison’s simpering-but-watchful Honey, who literally clutches her pearls as the games become more vicious.

The pacing does feel a bit tentative from time to time, though the moments of dramatic punctuation – a smashed bottle, a physical assault – pack a jolt in this intimate staging. I also suspect that the performances will take on richer emotional shadings during the run. But even with some shaky sections, Pulse’s “Virginia Woolf” leaves us disquieted, pondering whether the existential horrors anatomized by Albee hit all of us equally in a still-unequal society.